subject: The new breed of laymab users [print this page] There is a dramatic surge in the number of layman users
Internet has got virtually deep down penetration across the globe, and the profile of its users has also gone a sea change. Over the years, the internet has come out from the prerogative of select users of scientific and defense community to mass accessibility. And probably this is the temperament of this so called cyber age where people have just started to treat computers as just another thing that is indispensable to modern human existence.
Today the use of computers is not necessarily confined to hightech professionals, but has spanned over all functions and disciplines including common man for his everyday's purposes. Hence, there is a awful number of users who browse through the Internet on a periodic basis, and their surfing skills are at best rudimentary. Time is ripe for making your web site superbly user friendly.
This new breed of users with minimal exposure to browsing is vulnerable to encounter a little more difficulty in even a web site that is otherwise user friendly. Here is an important point not to be missed out that this new breed of surfers can be a great prospect for your site when their needs are understood and correspondingly catered to.
The need of the moment is to make your site excessively user friendly so that they are not lost on the web, and they do not just wind up browsing in sheer hopelessness. They need to be guided through simplistic features to help them know what to do next in order to get what they are looking forward to.
This sort of users lacks fundamental competence to search the stuff on the Internet effectively, faces hiccups in navigating web site and looks in astonishment while dealing with typical annoyances on the web. Their utter inability to understand your site often lead them to another site in search of ease, and it does constitute losses for you!
Designing your web site in such a manner as will enable them to learn quickly and steer clear the way to enriching experience is what is required in this regard.
But before making your web site layman friendly, it is essential to get the pulse of the browsing tendencies and habits of layman users.
An insightful look at the online behavior of layman users
Here are some interesting observations on the typical behavior of relatively new users while they use the Internet.
It is quite amazing to learn that new users have been found to practice a novel method to log on to a particular web site whose URL is known to them. They have been observed to type in the URL in Google search, and subsequently clicking on same URL in the returned search pages.
